21
Installation Manual
Unique Rooms and SPL in Large Areas
Are there any special considerations for
bathrooms?
Bathrooms are irregular rooms, rooms
within a room, with high ambient
background noise, often with noise
masking type of ambient sound, highly
reflective, and often fairly large. If
you pause and think about that for a
moment, these are some of the more
challenging rooms.
Commercial noise masking systems
rely on “white noise” which sounds
remarkably like a bathroom exhaust
fan and like the sound of water in a
shower-both of which are louder than
the background noise level in the other
parts of the house. So if the client
wants to rock out in the bathroom,
and particularly the shower, you need
to have speakers very near to them.
Modern day larger bathrooms need
more than two speakers for these
reasons.
What about large rooms as well as
rooms where the listener is far from the
speakers?
Typical in-wall speakers are designed
to be near the listener. In common
rooms with eight foot ceilings and
other usual dimensions, in-wall speak-
ers typically are not much more than
eight feet from the listener. In large
mansions, the game changes. Twenty
foot ceilings are normal and typical
speakers are too far away to provide
the client much SPL (sound pressure
level). There are in-wall speakers
designed for these longer “throw” dis-
tances. In general, larger rooms with
more height require more speakers
and speakers with tighter “directivity”
to get party-level SPL. In this case,
also, size matters and bigger speakers
are better.
Advanced Discussions (continued)
